The Biochemical Core Laboratory of this PPG was established over 20 years ago as a resource facility to provide a consolidated, highly specialized, well equipped and professionally staffed unit capable of performing a variety of immunoassay and other biochemical procedures as required by Program Project Investigators. Over this time, the utilization and resource capacity of this lab has grown and has received substantial capital input from the department and institution to purchase the equipment now available in the core and to sustain the state-of-the-art technology used in the development and routine work of this program. No single laboratory supported with R01 grants alone would be capable of equipping and staffing this analytical resource. This centralized facility is critical to the success of each of the proposed projects of this program and the continued support of this facility is justified by the large number of biochemical and analytical determinations required for the proposed studies. Centralizing the personnel and equipment in the Biochemical Core allows this laboratory to perform routine biochemical analyses in a more efficient and cost effective manner than if the investigators had setup to perform these analyses within their individual laboratories. Consolidation of all of the analytical work of this program into the Core also increases sample loads to an extent that we can justify automating most assays as we upgrade and replace existing equipment. For example, all of our HPLC systems are now equipped with refrigerated autosamplers and we converted most of our routine spectrophotometric assays to run on an clinical chemistry autoanalyzer we modified and reprogrammed to work with the sample volumes we can collect from rats and mice. This has greatly reduced our sample turnaround times and has proved to be highly cost effective by reducing technician time and allowing the work to proceed on a 24hr a day/7 day a week schedule.